About

Aims and scope

BMC Bioinformatics is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that considers articles on all aspects of the development, testing and novel application of computational and statistical methods for the modeling and analysis of all kinds of biological data, as well as other areas of computational biology.

Open access

All articles published by BMC Bioinformatics are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Further information about open access can be found here.

As authors of articles published in BMC Bioinformatics you are the copyright holders of your article and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate your article, according to the BioMed Central license agreement.

For those of you who are US government employees or are prevented from being copyright holders for similar reasons, BioMed Central can accommodate non-standard copyright lines. Please contact us if further information is needed.

Article-processing charges

Open access publishing is not without costs. BMC Bioinformatics therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1370.00/$2145.00/€1745.00 for each article accepted for publication, plus VAT or local taxes where applicable.

If the corresponding author's institution participates in our open access membership program, some or all of the publication cost may be covered (more details available on the membership page). We routinely waive charges for authors from low-income countries. For other countries, article-processing charge waivers or discounts are granted on a case-by-case basis to authors with insufficient funds. Authors can request a waiver or discount during the submission process. For further details, see our article-processing charge page.

BMC provides a free open access funding support service to help authors discover and apply for article processing charge funding. Visit our OA funding and policy support page to view our list of research funders and institutions that provide funding for APCs, and to learn more about our email support service.

Indexing services

All articles published in BMC Bioinformatics are included in:

Biological Abstracts

BIOSIS

CAS

DBLP

DOAJ

Embase

EmBiology

EmCare

MEDLINE

PubMed

Science Citation Index Expanded

SCImago

​Scopus

The full text of all articles is deposited in digital archives around the world to guarantee long-term digital preservation. You can also access all articles published by BioMed Central on SpringerLink.

Peer-review policy

Peer-review is the system used to assess the quality of a manuscript before it is published. Independent researchers in the relevant research area assess submitted manuscripts for originality, validity and significance to help editors determine whether the manuscript should be published in their journal. You can read more about the peer-review process here.

In cases where the journal is unable to find sufficient peer reviewers, the services of a publishing partner, Research Square, may be used to identify suitable reviewers and provide reports to avoid further delays for authors. Reviewers recruited by Research Square are paid a small honorarium for completing the review within a specified timeframe. Honoraria are paid regardless of the reviewer recommendation

BMC Bioinformatics operates a single-blind peer-review system, where the reviewers are aware of the names and affiliations of the authors, but the reviewer reports provided to authors are anonymous.

The benefit of single-blind peer review is that it is the traditional model of peer review that many reviewers are comfortable with, and it facilitates a dispassionate critique of a manuscript.

Manuscripts submitted to BMC Bioinformatics are assessed by our editors and/or peer reviewers. Overall editorial responsibility for the journal is with the Editor. Section Editors provide oversight for manuscripts submitted to their section with Associate Editors acting as handling editors.

BMC Bioinformatics is part of the BMC series which publishes subject-specific journals focused on the needs of individual research communities across all areas of biology and medicine. We do not make editorial decisions on the basis of the interest of a study or its likely impact. Studies must be scientifically valid; for research articles this includes a scientifically sound research question, the use of suitable methods and analysis, and following community-agreed standards relevant to the research field.

Specific criteria for other article types can be found in the submission guidelines.

Editorial policies

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Appeals and complaints

Authors who wish to appeal a rejection or make a complaint should, in the first instance, contact the Editor who will provide details of the journal's complaints procedure.

Citing articles in BMC Bioinformatics

Articles in BMC Bioinformatics should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. Because articles are not printed, they do not have page numbers; instead, they are given a unique article number.

Why publish your article in BMC Bioinformatics

High visibility

BMC Bioinformatics's open access policy allows maximum visibility of articles published in the journal as they are available to a wide, global audience.

Speed of publication

BMC Bioinformatics offers a fast publication schedule whilst maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles will be published with their final citation after acceptance, in both fully browsable web form, and as a formatted PDF.

Flexibility

Online publication in BMC Bioinformatics gives you the opportunity to publish large datasets, large numbers of color illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links (for example, to PubMed, to sequence and other databases, and to other articles).

Promotion and press coverage

Articles published in BMC Bioinformatics are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be highlighted on BMC Bioinformatics’s pages and on the BioMed Central homepage.

In addition, articles published in BMC Bioinformatics may be promoted by press releases to the general or scientific press. These activities increase the exposure and number of accesses for articles published in BMC Bioinformatics. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BioMed Central is available here.

Copyright

As an author of an article published in BMC Bioinformatics you retain the copyright of your article and you are free to reproduce and disseminate your work (for further details, see the BioMed Central license agreement).

For further information about the advantages of publishing in a journal from BioMed Central, please click here.